“At Home in the World: Perspectives Ancient and Modern on a Changing Nature”

Organized by Gabriel Sessions and Sara Grossman

Thursday, April 25, 2019

VCAM, Haverford College e

In her essay “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons,” Zadie Smith, one of the leading authors in contemporary fiction, laments that “there is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words.”

The “At Home in the World: Perspectives Ancient and Modern on a Changing Nature” symposium untangles the meaning of Smith’s call for “intimate words” and strives to answer it. It showcases student work that questions how we can imagine care, family, home, hospitality, kinship, justice, and, indeed, intimacy, given the fragility, or the antagonism, or the simple interference of a nature many have understood as a setting secondary to human activity. Students will pose this question to contextualize, together, their own anxieties and meditations on environment in an age of climate change, with the aid of visiting experts, contemporary artists, and scholars in the environmental humanities. Together, we will also ask what comes next.

Projects on display will take many forms: a timeline will organize events from past human-earth encounters that speak to the long history of entanglements between humans and their environments, and reveal the constant struggle and stewardship that is part of the evolution of biospheric life on earth. A roundtable discussion of literary and musical evocations of environment will answer the question of how the non-human may speak to us when it becomes more than a background for human activity. And an evening of performances across the arts will transpose the intimacy Smith calls for into the utopian space in which performance affects reality with its “what if?,” involving audience and artist alike in a shared imagine of new possibilities.

Supported by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities’ Tuttle Creative Residencies Program, the Haverford College Department of English, and the Bryn Mawr College Department of Environmental Studies